Edinburgh Film Seminar: Dr Michelle Devereaux

About the seminar 

By Dr Michelle Devereaux...

In Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, the late philosopher Stanley Cavell defines scepticism, in part, as ‘a kind of violence the human mind performs in response to its discovery of its limitation or exclusion, its sense of rebuff by truth’. Throughout his long career, Cavell charted a course of thought on the ‘problem’ of scepticism: the desire to overcome alienation through acknowledgment of others while simultaneously asserting individual self-reliance, as Emerson called the quest for self-realisation in the face of societal conformity. For the sceptic, the fact that we cannot access fundamental truths about the nature of reality and ‘other minds’ leads to a shrinking away from life, contradicting the human wish to escape from just such subjectivity and isolation. As a result, the sceptic ‘haunt[s] the world’, unable to rectify the desire to be known and acknowledge others with the fear of these very same things.

In the same book Cavell also writes, ‘[I]t should not be taken to follow that women do not get into the way of skepticism, but only that the passion of doubt may not express a woman’s sense of separation from others…’. What are we to make of this supposed gendered difference, the idea that the scepticism Cavell details might be a ‘male business’? My research addresses this question through a study of a selection of recent films and television series, which I relate both to Cavell’s work on scepticism and various feminist theories of identity and intersubjectivity.

Working with a corpus primarily written and directed by women (including Lynne Ramsay, Michaela Coel, Jennifer Kent, Debra Granik and Chloé Zhao), I look at narratives relating to the experiences of both women and men in relation to scepticism’s ‘problematic of self-reliance and conformity, or of hope and despair’. By engaging with Cavell’s ground-breaking film-philosophy work within a contemporary context, I hope to explore how his provocative notion that philosophical scepticism is ‘inflected, if not altogether determined, by gender, by whether one sets oneself aside as masculine or feminine’ with the goal of illuminating how such an enduring human problem is ‘worked out’ in our own era through cinema, which Cavell sees as a ‘moving image of scepticism’ itself.

This event will take place via Zoom. Once you have registered through Eventbrite, you will be emailed a link on the day of the event.

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About the speaker 

Michelle Devereaux is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellow at the University of Warwick’s Department of Film and Television Studies. She received her doctorate in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 and has taught film theory and history at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Birmingham. Her first monograph, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. 

Are you interested in studying film?

Home to a renowned arts scene and the longest continuously running film festival, the Edinburgh Internatonal Film Festival, the city offers excellent art house cinemas, galleries, theatres, a vibrant film culture and many job opportunities. The academic staff in Film Studies are published researchers with a focus on film theory, film-philosophy and national cinemas, while Film, Exhibition and Curation staff combine critical expertise with extensive experience in curating and making film. We offer one year taught Masters degrees in either Film Studies or in Film, Exhibition and Curation. The MSc in Film Studies is designed for students particularly interested in theory, film-philosophy and art house cinema, while the MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation combines critical and project based approaches to screening film and developing audiences.

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